A client came to us recently for help building her social media connections. She already had a few thousand followers – a nice number! – that she’d gotten with the help of another firm.
But she’d become suspicious of their strategies and canceled her contract.
Two weeks after she came to us, more than 1,600 of her followers disappeared between breakfast and lunch one day. A couple weeks later, nearly 900 vanished overnight.
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If you’re using social media for marketing, what should you say following a tragedy like the deadly blasts at the Boston Marathon on Monday?
The horrific elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn.?
The October storm that took lives and devastated communities across the Northeast?
Sometimes, nothing at all.
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I was never a fan of the cocktail party-variety networking scene. I will never be one to dart around a room shoving business cards into people’s hands. I prefer meaningful conversations with people, getting to know them and vice versa.
But social media networking? That’s something different altogether. Done right, it’s never a hit-and-run. Rather, it consists of building relationships over months and even years by sharing information – both professional and personal – through posts, comments and responding to questions in various online communities.
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Joining the New No. 2 Social Media Network
In the world of social networks, innovation can quickly change the field of frontrunners — remember LiveJournal?
We just saw it again as Google+ overtook Twitter to claim the No. 2 spot behind Facebook. And it’s already better than Facebook for small businesses, professional firms and entrepreneurs.
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His handle is @Pontifex and 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI can tweet in eight different languages on his brand new Twitter account.
Last week, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church tentatively typed out his first tweet on an iPad. It read, “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”
(For those of you counting, that’s the maximum 140 characters allowed per tweet. Once His Holiness gets the hang of things, he’ll want to shorten them up a bit so they’ll be easier for his followers to re-tweet.)
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The techniques that increase visibility for our websites are constantly changing because technology is constantly changing. What worked a couple years ago to catch the attention of a search engine – like hiding keywords at the bottom of a web page – is as outdated as naming a company A-1 Pest Control in order to be listed first in the Yellow Pages. (Remember the Yellow Pages?)
Fortunately, Will Candler, our Marketing Coordinator here at EMSI Public Relations, is an Internet whiz who stays on top of changing search engine algorithms and finds new ways to use them. Will has been playing a lot lately with Google+, the new frontier in social media, and he recently discovered something new to love about it: It can boost your web page’s ranking when your connections do Google searches.
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The remarkable thing about publicity is that, unlike money, it increases in value every time you “spend” it.
The story about you in the paper, that TV or radio interview you did — they get an even bigger audience when you share them on social media. And when you post them on your website, they enjoy long, productive lives boosting your credibility.
Knowing this, I look for ways to share the publicity we get here at EMSI on my own social media sites. But you know, sometimes it just feels awkward! I’m definitely not one to go around bragging to my friends, much less posting, “Hey, look at this great TV interview I did” on my Facebook page.
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Are You Having Social Media Problems?
Social media is the most rapidly changing aspect of our industry to begin with. Throw in an IPO (Facebook) and a major overhaul (LinkedIn) and modifications are barreling ahead so fast, even the techies seem unable to keep up.
Last week, after a series of problems with my LinkedIn account, I emailed a request for assistance. Miguel, my Customer Experience Advocate, eventually replied:
“Dear Marsha,
“I apologize taking so long to get back to you. We are currently experiencing an unusual high volume of requests due to our recent site enhancements.”
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For many people, launching a personal social networking account on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ and firing off some posts is pretty basic stuff. Even the technologically challenged among us find that, with a little help getting started, it’s not so difficult.
But using social media to market your book, product or company can be a lot like learning to play golf. The game appears simple: Put a ball on a tee and whack it towards a little hole. Then you discover all those pesky nuances you have to learn, like mulligans and handicaps and bogeys and hooks.
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There was a bit of a hullabaloo in the Twitter-verse last month when Mitt Romney’s audience suddenly jumped by more than 100,000 new followers – in one day.
He’d been attracting 3,000 to 4,000 a day when, on July 20, that number shot to 24,000. The next day, it went through the roof – 117,000 new followers!
No, he hadn’t tweeted anything particularly profound or surprising. He was getting just a few hundred mentions by others on the social networking site, nowhere near enough to account for all the interest.
Those in the know quickly guessed the reason: a social media marketing firm.
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